Glossary
The words hiring teams use in India, defined plainly.
36 terms recruiters, HR and hiring managers use every day, with what they mean in practice and how HireZeta handles them.
A
- ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
- Software that tracks candidates for open roles from application to offer.
B
- Background verification (BGV)
- Checking a candidate's employment, education and identity before or after joining.
- Boolean search
- Searching with AND, OR, NOT and quotes to find exact profiles.
C
- Careers page
- The page on your site listing open roles with an application form.
- CTC (Cost to Company)
- The total yearly cost of an employee, including fixed pay, variable pay and benefits.
D
- Diversity hiring
- Deliberately widening the pipeline to under-represented groups.
- DPDP Act
- India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
E
- Expected CTC
- The salary a candidate asks for in the new role.
H
- HRMS (Human Resource Management System)
- Software for employees after they join: records, attendance, leave, payroll.
I
- Immediate joiner
- A candidate who can start within a couple of weeks.
- In-hand salary
- Monthly take-home after deductions.
- Interview scorecard
- A structured rating each interviewer submits after a round.
J
- Job requisition
- The internal approval to open a role, with headcount and budget.
K
- Kanban board
- Columns for stages, cards for candidates; drag to move.
L
- LPA (Lakhs Per Annum)
- The unit Indian salaries are quoted in: one lakh is ₹1,00,000.
- LWD (Last Working Day)
- The date a resigning employee's notice ends.
M
- Mandate
- A consultancy's word for a client's hiring requirement.
N
- Notice buyout
- Paying the employer to shorten the notice period.
- Notice period
- The time an employee must serve after resigning, typically 30 to 90 days in India.
O
- Offer shopping
- Using one offer to get a better one elsewhere or a counter from the current employer.
- Offer-to-joining ratio
- The share of accepted offers that actually join.
- Onboarding
- Everything between the accepted offer and a productive first month.
P
- Pipeline
- The ordered stages a candidate moves through for a role.
- Placement fee
- What a consultancy charges when a candidate joins, usually a percentage of CTC.
R
- Replacement guarantee
- A consultancy's promise to replace a hire who leaves early, at no extra fee.
- Resume parsing
- Turning a resume file into structured fields automatically.
- RMS (Recruitment Management System)
- The Indian consultancy term for an ATS with client and mandate tracking.
- RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing)
- Outsourcing part or all of a company's hiring to a provider.
S
- SLA (stage SLA)
- The maximum days a candidate should spend in a stage.
- Sourcing
- Finding candidates who did not apply.
- Stage
- One step in a pipeline, such as Screening or Technical round.
- Structured interview
- The same questions and rating scale for every candidate in a round.
T
- Talent pool
- A saved group of candidates for future roles.
- Time to fill
- Days from opening a role to an accepted offer.
- Time to hire
- Days from a candidate entering the pipeline to accepting the offer.
X
- X-ray search
- Using Google to search inside a site, such as LinkedIn profiles.
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